


Binary Function

by Carbon65



Series: Repository [3]
Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Cross-Posted on Tumblr, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Graduate School, Grief, Jason Todd is Dead, Party, Party Games, PhDon't, Police, Pre-Relationship, Tuxedos, Vomiting, abstract violence, canon character death, public grief, trivia games, violence against police
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-26
Updated: 2019-03-26
Packaged: 2019-12-18 11:17:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18248753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carbon65/pseuds/Carbon65
Summary: It’s the first time her father has made her come to the police gala in two years. So much has changed in that time. But, Barbara and Dick are going to get through this the only way they know how: making it all a game





	Binary Function

**Author's Note:**

> Umm... sorry not sorry. All warnings should be in the tags, except maybe food?

> A binary function returns a “True” or “False” value based on the input.

* * *

“What are you doing now, Richard?” Mrs Samuels asks in her reedy voice. She leans in, her pouf of white hair titling so she can hear Dick with her good friend ear. “Still in school?”

“I just finished at the academy, Ma’am.” Dick smiles the kind of thousand watt smiles designed to charm elderly ladies.

“Bruce must be so proud of you.” 

Dick looks pained, but he nods anyway. Better than going into his current actual relationship with his adopted father with a women who might be married to one of the biggest gossips in Gotham. 

“And Barbara, so lovely to see you.” The octogenarian turns her attention to her next ~~victim~~ subject. “How are you?”

“I’m doing well, Mrs Samuels.” She pitches her voice louder and smooths the skirt of the dress her father had bullied her into wearing. Sort of like he’d bullied her into attending this year. She’s had a reprieve the past two: first, because of her own accident and last year because for the first time in anyone memory (present company included), Bruce Wayne had declined to host the event. 

“You’re still in the wheelchair.”

“Yes, Mrs. Samuels.” It’s hard to keep the impacience out of her voice. Despite the fact that it’s the least invasive variant of the question that she’s heard this evening. 

“And, I suppose you’re not working?”

“No, Ma’am,” Barbara’s voice takes on a note of pride. “I’m doing a PhD at Gotham state, looking at the way in which city planning shapes society.” It’s the best elevator pitch she can come up with, one that sounds slightly more professional than, “I want to understand why Gotham has Batman and Metropolis has Superman”. 

“Oh…” Mrs Samuels is rarely at a loss for words. “How… brave, Barbara, dear.” 

And then, she bustles off in the direction of Mrs. Washington. The two ladies have been living together in a one bedroom apartment in central Gotham since the early 80s when Mrs Samuel’s husband died and Mr Washington decided to fuck off to Aruba with this secretary, leaving his ex-wife with a sizable alimony payment, a teenage daughter, and a lot of free time on her hands. 

Barbara feels her face flush, and bites her lip.

Dick glances over, raising an eyebrow. He takes her mostly empty glass of champagne and places it on the tray of a passing waiter. “Want to blow this joint?” 

She shakes her head. “Nah, I promised Dad I’d come, and I have to be there for his speech. It’s just…”

“What?”

“Before…” she motions at herself, frustratedly, “Before, when told people I was doing a PhD, they said I must be so smart. Now, they just tell me I’m ‘brave’ or ‘inspiring’. Like… I can’t be smart now, or I wasn’t brave before.”

“Well, I know you’re smart, you’re one of the smartest people I know,” Dick says with so much sincerity she might think he was being sarcastic, if he wasn’t Dick Grayson. “One is the smartest, and possibly one of the bravest.”

She wants to say something self deprecating, or maybe self pitying. She wants to admit that she cried on Thursday after a meeting with her boss when Eric changed his mind for the seventeenth or eighteenth time this week. She wants to tell Dick that she doesn’t think she can do it, that maybe if _this_ is what it means to have a PhD, it’s not worth it. Except that if she admits that, she has to admit that it feels like the cost of the degree might be her soul and her sanity. And, she can’t admit that to Dick. She can’t tell him that her degree feels like a carefully placed chisel along fault lines in her psyche that she never knew about.

She can’t say any of that, so she pushes it back and grins at Dick. She goes back to an old party standard. “Interestingly, I think that title might belong to Officer Donovan.” 

This game was Jason's game, one of the only ways for him to get through these parties without ending up in the kind of trouble no one wanted. She and Dick had been assigned babysitting duty after Alfred had caught Jason showing off a new pocket watch the morning after one of Bruce's soirees. And, even though they were six and eight years older than Jason, respectively, Dick and Barbara were still the only other people at the party under the legal age to drink. Not that it always stopped them. Bruce’s response might have been more effective, but age had never been a deterant. And, apparently, it's an older brother's job to keep the younger ones out of trouble.  
Barbara hasn’t mentioned it to anyone, but it had always been Jim Jr who tried to stop her from doing stupid things. Then again, Jimmy is her cousin and not her brother, and maybe that's the difference. 

So, they'd come up with a game to play. Something quiet but clever, to keep Jason distracted. And, in the end, they'd ended up distracting themselves. Which may have been the point, and may have just been an added benefit. And, even with everything missing, Barbara isn't sure how they'll get through this gala without it. Maybe because it's the only absence she can control. 

“Office Donovan?” It takes Dicks brain a minute to identify the officer in question, wasn’t actually a police officer. He was a hired rent a cop who skulked around Gotham High when they were students. 

“Officer Donovan, eh? You wouldn’t believe it but I once heard he was a genius at Italian food. Interestingly, he once beat Bobby Flay at making pizza.” Dick's voice is light, lighter than it had been the last time she'd tried to play the game.

Barbara smirks. Donovan ate the rubber pizza in the health room and claimed the reheated school pizza was the best he’d ever eaten. As a teen, Barbara had just seen this as a point of mockery. As an adult, she sometimes wonder how much reflects a time when school pizza was the only reliable meal in Donovan’s day. 

Jay… nope. She’s not doing that here. Because if she does, it will show on her face and she’ll start to fall apart. And then Dick will fall apart. And, as much as she hates coming to these and dressing up, she wants it to not have terrible memories. The last time she was at this house with Dick was Jason’s wake. She’s not strong enough to see that Dick Grayson tonight. And Dick is strong enough that he’ll throw caution to the wind and let himself be that man in the space between charming old ladies and scowling at Bruce.

“Interestingly, I heard it was a pesto pizza.” She tried to keep her tone light and the memories out of her voice. 

Dick shrugs and grins. He snags to glasses of water from a passing waiter and hands one to her, and to canapés with… pesto. Dick knows her all too well. “Interestingly it was also Julius Caesar’s favorite food.” 

She accepts the little piece of toast with a grin.

“The romans didn’t eat basil,” Tim, Bruce’s latest… she doesn’t know how to describe them, announces. 

“One, you broke the rules so that doesn’t count, and two, actually, according to Pliny, the Romans loved that shit.” _Jason_.

She hopes the name doesn’t escape to her tongue. Worried, she glances at the boys, but neither is showing the distress that usually accompanies that name. Dick is rolling his eyes and making his _God, you’re such a nerd_ face, and Tim just looks confused. Dick has taught his face to lie, but not his eyes, and even though Barbara doesn’t want to be good at reading him, she is. Even though she doesn’t want to trust Bruce’s new scrappy little orphan who used to get detention for climbing up the dugout in gym class to do handstands or being kicked out of history because he couldn’t keep still or walking the tucked away climbing rope like silks. (Because this was the 90s and early aughts and unlike 80s movies would have had you believe, 2002’s summer phys ed class didn’t allow students to be higher than they could jump without a harness. Something about litigious parents.) Barbara knows Dick, and even if he wants to hide it, she knows when he’s hurting. And, he's not hurting now any more than he was ten minutes ago. She hasn’t made anything worse.

Tim screws up his all too open face. “The Game?”

“Goddamnit, you made me lose!” Dick exclaims.

“What?”

“Also lost, and you don’t want to know.” Barbara barely manages to keep the annoyance out of her voice. “Interesting, I know someone who won.” 

Dick Grayson is too smart to take the bait. 

A nervous looking waiter comes over, and indicates it’s time for them to take their seats. Looking around, Barbara realizes they’re some of the last few. And, her table is halfway across the ballroom. Fuck.

She and Dick exchange a long suffering look over Tims head, and start moving across the ballroom as quickly as they can. Bruce likes his galas to run on time. Barbara’s muscles hurt faintly at the memory of push ups and sit ups and squats incurred by teenage delay once upon a time ago.

* * *

Her father gives a good speech. A normal speech. The kind of speech that has to be given every year in Gotham so that the wealthy benefactors of the city continue giving money to the police insurance fund. The union does its best, but this is Gotham and there has to be money to cover the funerals. She’s not sure how the city manages to find so many cops every year.

The police commissioner reads off a list of names that seems to get longer. He starts with the black list, first. When she came to the first one, back when visiting Uncle Jim and Aunt Barbie was a treat, she’d wondered loudly when it was the black list. The paper was white. And, the names didn’t sound black. Her mother had taken her firmly by the hand, and lead her out of the room while she looked at the reflection of her serious little face in the shiny black shoes with the little ribbon bows. It was one of the few questions no one would answer. After her parents were gone, and then Aunt Barbie and Jimmy were gone, and it was just her and Uncle Jim and the heady mistress of Uncle Jim’s job in the old house with the sycamore tree in front of the lawn, she used to watch a lot of medical shows while doing her homework and waiting up so she didn’t have to tuck herself into bed. She was fourteen when she learned why the list was black. She’d gone into one of Bruce Wayne’s big bathrooms, the crinoline of her first cocktail dress scratching her leg as she vomited until there was nothing left in her. That’s how she knows that Bruce’s eye make up remover is good, but it’s not industrial strength. She’d spent the rest of the night avoiding her uncle so she wouldn’t have to explain the new raccoon eyes she was sporting. Also, possibly, because she definitely probably maybe had sworn at Dick Grayson and Mr. Pennyworth had overheard, and she was pretty sure Uncle Jim was going to be mad. But as much because of the crying as the swearing. At least as much. 

As the list goes one, she watches as Dick’s mouth moves in a silent benediction, the one he says every year. _Eternal rest, grant unto them, Oh Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon their face._ Dick's not really a practicing Catholic, he knows the sign of the cross and probably how to follow the weird Simon-says version of church. He's not practicing, but he knows this prayer and when all else fails, these are the words he comes back to for comfort.

Barbara's parents were nominally Presbyterian, they attended because it was social as much because they believed. She remembers the starched dresses and shiny shoes and Sunday school lessons. When she came to Gotham, Uncle Jim and Aunt Barbie didn't practice, maybe never had. There was no social structure around it, it wasn't needed. And so, she'd let it slip away as a memory of her parents with no attachment. Unlike Dick, she doesn't draw on rote prayer when she needs comfort, she can't.

Instead, she and Jason used to sit, stoically, while the list was read. The best they could do, the best either of them could do, was try to remember. She knows that if she was truly trying to remember, she'd write the names as her father read them, but memorizing the names is a lie. Maybe Jason had been able to do it. Or, maybe he'd just been trying not to be angry. That if he'd opened his mouth or moved, he would have lost his temper and demanded of Gotham City why so many people - cops yes, and civilians as well - were dying every day in this city.

Barbara looks to the chair where Jason was always seated. Someone has left it empty, with a fully set place, as though it's waiting for someone. Maybe a boy who's grounded until he finishes his homework, or was supposed to attend but is on a school field trip. It's there waiting for someone who is coming back, not the empty hole in their lives.

She looks across the table for his green eyes that barely suppress the anger. But, they're not there. Just Tim Drake, staring at his lap and mouthing the names as her father says them, and Dick with his eyes scrunched shut while he asks for perpetual repose and light. She wants to know if, underneath it all, they're angry. If they know why she's angry. If they know why Jason was angry. 

Instead of solidarity, she just gets a hole. A blank. A place where someone should be, and they're not. They all avoid it, in their own ways, as though if they touched it, it would contaminate them too, and they'd lose themselves. 

Bruce copes… Barbara doesn’t know how the fuck Bruce copes. She hasn’t seen the man in ages, but when she does, he’s all smiles, all lies, all distraught idiot, mourning a child whose death he cannot explain. In the day, he faces the world, the board, the galas and parties and paparazzi. He withdrew for a while, but after a month, he had to return. But, now, he smiles less. And, he looks like he sleeps less, too. There are dark circles under his eyes, and Batman prowls late into the night, well past the hours he used to keep.

Dick, too, smiles. Dick smiles on the outside and cries in private and paces and babbles asking over and over again if it was his fault. And then Dick does what Dick does best and he throws himself into the physical. He runs and swims and tumbled and flies and fights until he’s too tired and sore to think. Until his mind settles back into his body again and he can sleep for a while. 

Barbara feels herself getting angry. Angry because it hurts so damn much and it feels like she swallowed something dark and burning and numbing. Angry because this is so damn stupid and she doesn’t understand why there are so many names on this list. Angry and empty and burning and gaping and whole. She feels the tears that are her response to an inexplicable pain prickling at her eyes, and she swipes at them, carefully. Plenty of Gothamites cry at this annually. It’s just that Barbara Gordon has never been one of them...

They get to the end, they survive this with Dick praying and Bruce stoic and Tim echoing and her father reading and Gotham crying and Barbara furious. 

They get they get to the end. To the moment of silence that envelops the ballroom: the visceral, weighty silence of two hundred people trying to remember individual faces and lives instead of uniforms and numbers and gold badges. 

Into that weighty silence, eyes straight ahead and hands white knuckles and voice taught as a grapple line, Bruce Wayne speaks three words that right out like bells into the emptiness of the space and their lives and their hearts.

“Jason Peter Todd.” 

It there was silence before, there is stillness now. That weird stillness of frozen time out of time. The stillness of shock. Dick’s frantic counting has stopped: ten and ten and ten and ten and ten. Tim has frozen, the silent word that might be _Adoni_ waiting to be be finished. Gotham has frozen, crystalline in this minute.

And then, the moment is shattered in a single, muffled, heart breaking wail and the lisping heart beat of a person in thin soles shoes running from the room. 

The ballroom goes back to silence again, but it’s a new silence: the shuffling uncomfortable silence of people waiting and wondering and pretending to pray. As they wait for the commissioners pocket watch to count down the seconds, Barbara feels tears pricking at her eyes. 

The remembrance ends with shuffling and switching papers from gray to pink. Barbara glances up, looking for Dick’s forced smile to tell her that it will be okay, but there are two empty seats, now.

She nods to herself, and makes a quick exit. She doesn’t care what people will say, what her father will say. People can assume what they want. People will assume what they want. But, she can’t be here for any more names.

* * *

She finds Dick in the downstairs library. She’s thankful it is the downstairs library because while she suspects that there is at least one elevator somewhere in Wayne Manor, she also has never been in a position to go looking. The closest she ever came was that first - really second - party when she was fourteen and found a dumb waiter. It's one of those pretentious sounding rooms: a library. Really, though, it’s a room that was probably something else where someone has attempted to coral the books that seem to flood Wayne Manor. The walls are lined with floor to ceiling bookshelves, crammed with old hardcovers, first editions, cheap trade paperbacks, comics, newspapers… genre and age and value dont seem to matter in the filing system. They stick out of the bookshelves - some build in and more than a few acquired from Ikea and assembled by the boys over the years.

There’s a dark shape draped across the daybed in the corner. It’s either Dick Grayson’s Armani jacket laid out across the patchwork quilt, or it’s Dick Grayson himself, huddled up. But, she knows Sick and so she looks up. There’s a chin-up bar suspended over open of the open doorways leading to a space she’d never bothered to explore, and Dick’s there in an untucked white t-shirt and black tuxedo pants, black suspenders hanging down on either side. The suspenders are probably rhetorical: Bruce’s party, Bruce’s money, Bruce’s ward mean Graysons tuxedo was probably tailored until it fit perfectly.

Part of Barbara wants to go over and pull herself up against the pull up bar. Her upper body has gotten strong, stronger than it was before. It’s cliched, but the abs she’s got are tighter than they used to be. She can support herself on her arms and shoulders and core, and she may not be able to match Dick pull up for pull up, but she won’t do so badly. But, there’s only one bar, and it’s set at a height designed for someone much taller than she is at the moment. Maybe if she was up on crutches, she could try and reach the bar. But the whole thing sounds stupid right now, and she’s not in the mood.

“Hey, Boy Blunder, get your ass down here.” 

God, she sounds bossy. It may be the only way to keep the strain out of her voice, though. It’s her teaching voice, her presentation voice, the one she uses when she wants attention and mystery and doesn't want everyone to know just how close she is to breaking down. 

Dick does one more pull up, and then lets himself hang before he drops the three inches to the ground. When he turns to face her, she can see the tears in his eyes.

“Com’ere.” Barbara opens her arms. 

She’s never been good at emotions, not because she’s cold or logical like people seem to assume, but because of the way they swallow her. Barbara _feels_ things in ways apparently other people don’t. She feels them running through her, tugging her off course. She’s logical, analytical even, but that doesn’t mean that her emotions don’t also burn holes through her heart.

Dick comes over, hiking up his pants and suspenders. He takes the carefully laid out suit jacket and vest from the daybed, and lays them across a chair with a look at speaks to just how upset Alfred will be if he returns looking less than presentable. Dick’s still mad at Bruce, but damn it if he doesn’t love Alfred just as much. 

She transfers onto the bed, arranging her skirts and holds out her arms for Dick to join her. He hesitates, as though he doesn’t think he deserves it.

“It’s not your fault.” They’re words that she thinks he needs to hear, but they’re true. “It’s not yours or Bruce’s. It’s His.” She doesn’t say The Name out loud. She’s not going to say That Name out loud. 

She shifts on the bed again, managing her legs and her dress with a fair bit of grace and aplomb. The mattress is squishy and comfortable, it looks like it belongs in some kind of attic room or the upstairs of someone’s grandmother’s house and not Wayne manor. This is a room no one is supposed to find. 

Dick unties his shoes while standing, due to his freakishly bendy nature, and then drops on the corner of the bed opposite her like a stone. He picks up one of the pillows, and holds it close.

“Dick,” the word is pleading and she doesn’t know if its for herself, or for him. She wants to go to him, but between the dip in the mattress and her dress, she’s questioning how she’s going to transfer back to her wheelchair from this position, let alone sprawled halfway out to get to Dick.

He sits on the bed, unmoving.

Dick Grayson is never still. He is a hummingbird whirl of movement, strength and power keeping him aloft. He finds comfort in movement, he finds solace in movement. Dick says he cannot think sitting still, he cannot live sitting still. He’s even kinetic in his sleep; back in those days of GSU, his roommate had a weird fascination with taking pictures of where Dick started the night and where he ended it. Most people grow out of the full 360º rotation before they hit puberty. Dick was somehow acrobatic enough to manage it, even if he did occasionally kick himself in the face. So, no, Dick Grayson is never still.

He sits at the end of the daybed, statue-like. “Actually, it’s my fault.” The crack in his voice is like a knife in her heart.

“No, those aren’t the rules.” She knows the words are flippant, and damn it, she’s flippant because one of them has to hold it together and sarcasm is like Barbara’s personal emotional duct tape. “Actually is for truth, and that’s a lie.”

“It’s the truth,” Dick insists as he _finally_ moves up the bed toward her. “It’s my fault.”

He slots himself in beside her, his shoulder pressed against her shoulder and his hip pressed against her hip. If she was wearing anything but this stupid slinky dress, she’d probably be pressing his leg up against hers as well. This is how Dick Grayson seeks comfort: pressed up close against you, as much of his body touching your as possible. She wraps an arm around his shoulder, and he leans against her.

“It’s my fault. I... I… I should’ve been there. He was a kid, Barbara, he was just a kid. And, if he’d had someone watching his back, then maybe…” Dick’s shoulders shake. “If I’d just… If Id been here, then Bruce wouldn’t ‘ave…”

She lets his words cascade over her, his fear and his doubt and his self blame. Dick isn’t the most articulate about this, he circles. He comes round and round to the same points, the same ideas, the same places, the same guilt. He circles and cycles and churns and its clear that it’s there, under the surface, waiting to come out.

And then, slowly, it peters out, and she’s left with her arm around a quietly sobbing Dick Grayson. 

“Actually, it’s not your fault,” she tells him, leaning in. “Actually, it’s His. Not yours, not Bruce’s, not Jason’s, not Alfred’s. His. He is responsible.”

And then, she waits until Dick is ready to pull himself back together again.

* * *

They sneak back in as the dancing starts. 

Dick has dawned his shirt, and pulled the suspenders back up. He’s lost weight since the suit was made, and it needs to be tailored again. There’s something still weirdly sexy about Dick in a white t-shirt with suspenders around his hips that makes her want to pull him back on the bed. Except, no, because he’s Dick. He’s the Boy Blunder. And, just… not today. He re-tied his bowtie, which he actually tied instead of clipping it on like her father does every year, and damn if she wasn’t impressed.

Then, because he’s Dick, he disappeared for about 5 minutes, rambling off to somewhere in the manor, and returned with what might have approached a professionals make up kit, and let her get to work. She knows that he grew up in the circus, but…

“Actually, it’s Bruce’s.” 

There are drinks circulating as they come back in and a few deserts still out. Barbara looks around in disappointment. “Fuck.”

Dicks smile is still a little bit wobbly. “Interestingly, there are never any leftovers.”

“Dad did say I only had to stay through his speech…” She really doesn’t want to stay for the inevitable dancing. She knows in theory that wheelchair dancing is a thing. She also doesn’t want her first try to be here, where everyone will praise her to her face about how well she’s adjusting, and then laugh at her behind her back.

Dick nods. “Give me a sec.” 

He re-appears a few moments later with a grin on his face. “There’s plenty in the kitchen, although Tim says he’s holding the microwave hostage until we explain the game. Bruce said something about it, and now, he’s curious.”

“Oh? Think we can take him?” 

“Actually, I do. Him, and anyone else standing between us and reheated salmon.”

“Me too, Boy Wonder, me too.”

**Author's Note:**

> This started off as me lamenting the idea of a disabled woman in a PhD program being inspirational. (Verses crazy. ...Anyone who does a PhD is slightly crazy. Whether or not they end up with a mental illness is another matter entirely.) I don't know where that started, but I was hit with this wave of inspiration running down the steps of the subway, and were we are, 5000 words later in a completely different direction.  
> Also, for the record, this game has ruined my (and probably Bab’s) ability to write scientific papers. It’s hard to transition to a cutting commentary to place your results into context if “Interestingly” sets off your bullshit detector. ...Blame my brother Rocky. Hopefully after he gets back from whatever death canyon he’s gone to for spring break
> 
> Questions, Comments, Concerns, Suggestions, Interesting or Actual observations all welcome. I love hearing what you think!


End file.
